couldn’t bear to look at him in this half-trance any longer. Nothing
can be understood,” Toby murmured again.
frustrated, Jack said, “But it understands us.” No.” What doesn’t it
understand about us?” Lots of things. Mainly … we resist.”
“Resist?”
“We resist it.”
“And that’s new to it?”
“Yeah. Never before.”
“Everything else lets it in,” Heather said. Toby nodded. “Except
people.” Chalk one up for human beings, Jack thought.
Good old Homo sapiens, bullheaded to the last. We’re just not
happy-go-lucky enough to let the puppetmaster jerk us around any way it
wants, too uptight, too damned stuborn to love being slaves.
“Oh,” Toby said quietly, more to himself than to hem or to the entity
controlling the computer. “I see.”
“What do you see?” Jack asked. Interesting.”
“What’s interesting?”
“The how.” Jack looked at Heather, but she didn’t seem to be tracking
the enigmatic conversation any better than he was. “It senses,” Toby
said. “Toby?”
“Let’s not talk about this,” the boy said, glancing away from the
screen for a moment to give Jack what seemed to be an imploring or
warning look. “Talk about what?”
“Forget it,” Toby said, gazing at the monitor again.
“Forget what?”
“I better be good. Here, listen, it wants to know.” Then, with a
voice as muffled as a sigh in a handkerchief, forcing Jack to lean
closer, Toby seemed to change the subject: “What were they doing down
there?” Jack said, “You mean in the graveyard?”
“Yeah.”
“You know.”
“But it doesn’t. It wants to know.”
“It doesn’t understand death,” Jack said. “No.”
“How can that be?”
“Life is,” the boy said, clearly interpreting a viewpoint that belonged
to the creature with which he was in contact. “No meaning. No
beginning. No end. Nothing matters. It is.”
“Surely this isn’t the first world it’s ever found where things die,”
Heather said. Toby began to tremble, and his voice rose, but barely.
“They resist too, the ones under the ground. It can use them, but it
can’t know them.” can use them, but it can’t know them. A few pieces
of the puzzle suddenly fit together. Reling only a tiny portion of the
truth. A monstrous, terible portion of the truth. Jack remained
crouched beside the boy in stunned silence. At last he said weakly,
“Use them?”
“But it can’t know them.” How does it use them?”
.”Puppets.” Heather gasped. “The smell. Oh, dear God. The smell
,the back staircase.” Though Jack wasn’t entirely sure what she was
talking about, he knew that she’d realized what was out e on the
Quartermass Ranch. Not just this thing in beyond, this thing that
could send the same dream to both of them, this unknowable alien thing
whose purpose was to become and to hate. Other things were out e. Toby
whispered, “But it can’t know them. Not even as much as it can know
us. It can use them better. Better than it can use us. But it wants to
know them. Become them. And they resist.” Jack had heard enough. Far
too much. Shaken, he rose from beside Toby. He flipped the master
switch to off, and the screen blanked. “It’s going to come for us,”
Toby said, and then he Ucended slowly out of his half-trance.
Bitter storm wind shrieked at the window behind them, but even if it
had been able to reach into the room, it couldn’t have made Jack any
colder than he already was. Toby swiveled in the office chair to
direct a puzzled look first at his mother, then at his father. The dog
came out of the corner. Though no one was touching it, the master
switch on the computer flicked from the Off to the On position.
Everyone twitched in surprise, including Falstaff. The screen gushed
with vile and squirming colors. Heather stooped, grabbed the power
cord, and tore it out of the wall socket. The monitor went dark again,
stayed dark.
“It won’t stop,” Toby said, getting up from the chair. Jack turned to
the window and saw that dawn had come, dim and gray, revealing a
landscape battered by a full-scale blizzard. In the past twelve hours,
fourteen to sixteen inches of snow had fallen, drifting twice that deep